I am a third year Joint Honours student studying History and Political Science. My academic interests are histories of South Asia, health policy and law, and violence.
From May 2020 to August 2020, I worked as a Research Assistant at the Polis Project. The Polis is an academic collective which publishes online media (articles, reports, podcasts, social media, etc) and conducts research on democracy, dissent and violence. For the most part, the Project focusses on India but is international in the sense that it builds solidarity and recognizes the role of diaspora in democracy and violence.
Founded by and , the Project gained immense popularity for its reports on violence towards minorities in India, arrests of civil rights activists, and most recently on India’s 74th Independence Day, the complicity of the Delhi Police in manufacturing evidence and brutality against Muslim residents. I had been following the Project since the start of my university career in 2018 and was a regular listener of their podcasts, in particular.
I contacted Ms. Vijayan early in May, inquiring about open positions at the Project. However, I was put in touch with Ms. Sirnate with help of a cousin, who worked with her during her time at the University of California, Berkeley. Within a week, I was a Research Assistant at the Project’s Political Violence and Justice Lab under Vasundhara Sirnate.
My role entailed creating a massive political violence dataset for the years 2019-2020. I scanned multiple newspaper archives and entered and cleaned data. I was frequently called in for research assistance on the Polis’ articles and reports where my data visualization skills came handy. I went on to have a rewarding professional relationship with Ms Sirnate, who was my direct supervisor. We spoke weekly if not daily, and she was only a message away if I had any questions or concerns about the data.
I also attended weekly meetings with a working group with a separate project on the similar subject as political violence. This working group consisted of academics and researchers outside of the Polis, and also outside of my academic subjects in the Social Sciences and Humanities.
Interacting with academics with such public-oriented research (most of them had projects on the ground which were dangerous in many ways) was an insight to how academia could be imagined as activism. Another key highlight was how organizations such as the Polis were adapting their research to the times we live in—one of polarization and pandemics. As elections are slated in a few key states in India this year, we focused on ways to track electoral violence and hate speech for online political rallies.
While much of the Polis’ work directly aligned with my academic interests, I was also exposed to new skills and areas which I had not imagined to be applicable in my degree. Creating the dataset was a reminder that digital humanities was an important way forward in evidence-based research. Moreover, I hope to become a meaningful witness to change—whether that means a career in law, government or academia. The four months that I worked with the Project were underscored by learning and witnessing the violence I had vicariously experienced as a young Indian my entire life. The reflection offered a fresh perspective of my agency with respect to the undemocratic arrests, vilification and conflicts in India.
To complete the internship, I was awarded the Arts Student Employment Fund.I extend my thanks to the Faculty of Arts Internship Office and the Arts Undergraduate Society for the funds, which came at a time when I had lost my previous internship abroad due to COVID-related closures. It would be reductive to say that they simply helped me; Funding was instrumental in maintaining a sense of security and dignity of my labour.
Remote work was a new experience for me. Initially I struggled with goal-setting. The miscalculation of speed and hence self-imposed deadlines meant that I did not have an accurate picture of my projected daily goals. From there, I started to time myself and reserved more regular blocks during the day to work. Such reflection was possible due to my diligent notetaking on the day’s tasks, even if they were the same as yesterday. Tracking my progress was a way to hold myself accountable and introspect on a “meta” on how I should work and contribute.
In the end, I am thoroughly grateful for having worked with the Polis Project—it was a humbling experience to contribute to the intellectual forces pushing against the present-day authoritarian tendencies of the Indian state. This experience would not have been possible without the Internship award, which I was honoured to receive.
